Singularity Sky

In the 21st century, the perfection of faster-than-light travel and the rise of a prodigious artificial intelligence known as the Eschaton altered the course of humankind. New civilizations were founded across the vastness of space. Now, the technology-eschewing world known as the New Republic is besieged by an alien information plague. Earth quickly sends a battle fleet - but is it coming to the rescue, or is a sinister plot in motion?

The Atrocity Archives: Book 1 in The Laundry Files

Never volunteer for active duty... Bob Howard is a low-level techie working for a super-secret government agency. While his colleagues are out saving the world, Bob's under a desk restoring lost data. His world was dull and safe; but then he went and got Noticed. Now, Bob is up to his neck in spycraft, alternative universes, dimension-hopping terrorists, monstrous elder gods and the end of the world. Only one thing is certain: it will take more than 'control+alt+delete' to sort this mess out...

We Are Legion (We Are Bob): Bobiverse, Book 1

Bob Johansson has just sold his software company and is looking forward to a life of leisure. There are places to go, books to read, and movies to watch. So it's a little unfair when he gets himself killed crossing the street. Bob wakes up a century later to find that corpsicles have been declared to be without rights, and he is now the property of the state. He has been uploaded into computer hardware and is slated to be the controlling AI in an interstellar probe looking for habitable planets.

Glasshouse

With Glasshouse, Stross pens a Kafkaesque tale set in a 27th-century of teleport gates and mind-attacking network worms. After Robin awakes in a clinic, he struggles to summon details of his life, but too many of his memories have been wiped clean. More troubling is the stark awareness of immediate danger: someone is trying to kill him. On the run, Robin makes a desperate gamble and volunteers for what he hopes is the sanctuary of an unusual study at the Glasshouse. Once there, however, he realizes the true terror has only begun.

Children of Time

Adrian Tchaikovksy's critically acclaimed stand-alone novel Children of Time is the epic story of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet. Who will inherit this new Earth? The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age - a world terraformed and prepared for human life. But all is not right in this new Eden.

Diaspora

Behold the orphan. Born into a world that is not a world. A digital being grown from a mind seed, a genderless cybernetic citizen in a vast network of probes, satellites, and servers knitting the Solar System into one scape, from the outer planets to the fiery surface of the Sun. Since the Introdus in the 21st century, humanity has reconfigured itself drastically. Most chose immortality, joining the polises to become conscious software.

Revenger

The galaxy has seen great empires rise and fall. Planets have shattered and been remade. Among the ruins of alien civilizations, building our own from the rubble, humanity still thrives. And there are vast fortunes to be made, if you know where to find them.... Captain Rackamore and his crew do. It's their business to find the tiny, enigmatic worlds that have been hidden away, booby-trapped, surrounded by layers of protection - and to crack them open for the ancient relics and barely remembered technologies inside.

Empire Games

Charles Stross builds a new series with Empire Games. Expanding on the world he created in the Family Trade series, a new generation of paratime travelers walk between parallel universes. The year is 2020. It's 17 years since the Revolution overthrew the last king of the New British Empire, and the newly reconstituted North American Commonwealth is developing rapidly, on course to defeat the French and bring democracy to a troubled world.

Blindsight

Set in 2082, Peter Watts' Blindsight is fast-moving, hard SF that pulls readers into a futuristic world where a mind-bending alien encounter is about to unfold. After the Firefall, all eyes are locked heavenward as a team of specialists aboard the self-piloted spaceship Theseus hurtles outbound to intercept an unknown intelligence.

The Three-Body Problem

Set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion.

Saturn's Children

In Saturn's Children, Freya is an obsolete android concubine in a society where humans haven't existed for hundreds of years. A rigid caste system keeps the Aristos, a vindictive group of humanoids, well in control of the lower, slave-chipped classes. So when Freya offends one particularly nasty Aristo, she's forced to take a dangerous courier job off-planet.

Altered Carbon

In the 25th century, humankind has spread throughout the galaxy, monitored by the watchful eye of the U.N. While divisions in race, religion, and class still exist, advances in technology have redefined life itself. Now, assuming one can afford the expensive procedure, a person's consciousness can be stored in a cortical stack at the base of the brain and easily downloaded into a new body (or "sleeve") making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen.

Change Agent: A Novel

New York Times best-selling author Daniel Suarez delivers an exhilarating sci-fi thriller exploring a potential future where CRISPR genetic editing allows the human species to control evolution itself. On a crowded train platform, Interpol agent Kenneth Durand feels the sting of a needle - and his transformation begins....

Echopraxia

It's the eve of the 22nd century: a world where the dearly departed send postcards back from Heaven and evangelicals make scientific breakthroughs by speaking in tongues; where genetically engineered vampires solve problems intractable to baseline humans. And it's all under surveillance by an alien presence. Daniel Bruks is a field biologist in a world where biology has turned computational.

The Collapsing Empire: The Interdependency, Book 1

Our universe is ruled by physics, and faster-than-light travel is not possible - until the discovery of The Flow, an extradimensional field we can access at certain points in space-time that transports us to other worlds, around other stars. Humanity flows away from Earth, into space, and in time forgets our home world and creates a new empire, the Interdependency, whose ethos requires that no one human outpost can survive without the others. It's a hedge against interstellar war - and a system of control for the rulers of the empire.

Consider Phlebas

The war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died, billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction, cold-blooded, brutal, and worse, random. The Idirans fought for their Faith; the Culture for its moral right to exist. Principles were at stake. There could be no surrender. Within the cosmic conflict, an individual crusade. Deep within a fabled labyrinth on a barren world, a Planet of the Dead proscribed to mortals, lay a fugitive Mind. Both the Culture and the Idirans sought it....

The Diamond Age

Neal Stephenson, "the hottest science fiction writer in America", takes science fiction to dazzling new levels. The Diamond Age is a stunning tale; set in 21st-century Shanghai, it is the story of what happens what a state-of-the-art interactive device falls into the hands of a street urchin named Nell. Her life, and the entire future of humanity, is about to be decoded and reprogrammed.

A Deepness in the Sky

After thousands of years searching, humans stand on the verge of first contact with an alien race. There are two human groups: the Qeng Ho, a culture of free traders, and the Emergents, a ruthless society based on the technological enslavement of minds.The group that opens trade with the aliens will reap unimaginable riches.

Rainbows End

Set a few decades from now, Rainbows End is an epic adventure that encapsulates in a single extended family the challenges of the technological advances of the first quarter of the 21st century. The information revolution of the past 30 years blossoms into a web of conspiracies that could destroy Western civilization. At the center of the action is Robert Gu, a former Alzheimer's victim who has regained his mental and physical health through radical new therapies, and his family.

The Reality Dysfunction

The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton is the first in Night's Dawn, a sweeping galactic trilogy from the master of space opera. In AD 2600 the human race is finally realizing its full potential. Hundreds of colonized planets across the galaxy host a multitude of wildly diverse cultures. Genetic engineering has pushed evolution far beyond nature's boundaries, defeating disease and producing extraordinary space-born creatures.

Fallen Dragon

In the distant future, corporations have become sustainable communities with their own militaries, and corporate goals have essentially replaced political ideology. On a youthful, rebellious impulse, Lawrence joined the military of a corporation that he now recognizes to be ruthless and exploitative. His only hope for escape is to earn enough money to buy his place in a better corporation.

Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

How will artificial intelligence affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society, and our very sense of being human? The rise of AI has the potential to transform our future more than any other technology - and there's nobody better qualified or situated to explore that future than Max Tegmark, an MIT professor who's helped mainstream research on how to keep AI beneficial.

Jason S says:"Deep dive into what a world with superhuman AI may look like"

Halting State

The year is 2012, and China, India, and the United States are waging an infowar for economic domination. With innocent gamers mere pawns in the hands of electronic intelligence agencies, programmer Jack Reed is tasked with ferreting out the plot of those who would gladly trade global turmoil for personal gain.

Publisher's Summary

The Singularity. It is the era of the posthuman. Artificial intelligences have surpassed the limits of human intellect. Biotechnological beings have rendered people all but extinct. Molecular nanotechnology runs rampant, replicating and reprogramming at will. Contact with extraterrestrial life grows more imminent with each new day.

Struggling to survive and thrive in this accelerated world are three generations of the Macx clan: Manfred, an entrepreneur dealing in intelligence amplification technology whose mind is divided between his physical environment and the Internet; his daughter, Amber, on the run from her domineering mother, seeking her fortune in the outer system as an indentured astronaut; and Sirhan, Amber’s son, who finds his destiny linked to the fate of all of humanity.

For something is systematically dismantling the nine planets of the solar system. Something beyond human comprehension. Something that has no use for biological life in any form...

Where does Accelerando rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

It is as if my engineering and physics degrees, and every other SF book I've ever read were training grounds preparing me for this book. Throwaway lines about quantum 3d printing (i.e. Captain Picard's replicators), Robert Forward laser sail starships, Frank J. Tipler computational resurrection, fixed-up Matrix plot-lines, nano-tech, Dyson spheres, Fermi's Paradox...all feeling like plausible speculation of taking Moore's law to the Singularity and beyond. And the author pretty much takes for granted you, the humble reader, know about all of these things, and more. But...this author makes it feel like these threads could really happen and weaves them into a story with interesting characters.

What did you like best about this story?

The feeling of realistic (pretty much?) speculation of modern day physics and Moore's law and extrapolating the hell out of it, with every plausible hard SF plot device thrown in. I loved being able to keep up with the author and where he took it. Mind expanding, IMHO. Probably not for everyone...this novel is for hard-SF science/engineering nerds who love to nitpick science fiction movies.

What does George Guidall bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

The narrator was distinctive and interesting, and hung in there like a champ for some of the more obscure bits.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

The Matrix for serious people...

Any additional comments?

there is about a 30 minute chunk at about hour 13 that is out of order.

It's a slog, to be blunt, as an audio book at least. You'll soon realize that what makes it difficult is the rather whiplash back and forth, both in the timeline, and between versions of the characters. As is often the case audio book producers have yet to master the art of the pause that gives the listener cues to when a scene changes. It's an especially pronounced in this reading.

What makes it worth the struggle, however, is that this book goes further in imaging the machinations of a post-singularity solar system than any other. It even extends to thoughtful consideration of the implications of the singularity on interstellar travel and first contact.

It's a complex story and you have to take care to keep the many small segments of the various plot lines strung together into contiguous threads, but it does make for a compelling and epic story of a sort that other authors seemingly fear to attempt.

I read the book a few years ago and loved it, and recently after attending Singularity University, listened to the audio version. I enjoyed the audio version more. George Guidall does a great job narrating and doing each of the character voices.

The story is fascinating, funny and intense - accelerating at a sometimes dizzying pace which keeps with the pace of a post-singular civilization.

I enjoy Stross's books. And I enjoyed Guidall's narration of American Gods. But this combination just doesn't work for me. Guidall has a problem with the accents and British slang, but that's not a deal breaker. The insurmountable issue for me is that he reads in a very fractured way, inserting long pauses randomly in sentences with amazing frequency, making the story hard to follow.

From what I managed to gather, this is a pretty interesting story, but getting past this narration style was just too hard to make the process enjoyable.

As a professional in the field of software development I can find myself loving the idea of this story. The mistake was in choosing George Guidall to narrate it as it makes the story extremely difficult to follow!

What didn’t you like about George Guidall’s performance?

I mean no offense to Mr. Guidall, but his performance in this book is horrific. It's nearly impossible to tell which character is speaking as George seem to make little to no effort to change the voice or otherwise help the listener keep who is speaking straight. It's also extremely difficult to know when a specific scene changes, often times we're in a totally different place but I was left thinking we were back at the previous location. I mean no offense to Mr. Guidall, but his lackluster performance destroyed this story for me.

Any additional comments?

I would love to see a revision to this book with a different narrator. Please strongly consider having this re-read by someone who knows when to pause, knows how to tell the listener who is speaking and is able to to keep things coherent to help prevent the utter feeling of confusion while listening. The story itself has huge potential, it's unfortunate that George's performance was at best sub-par as it made the story quite difficult to follow and wound up causing me to say: "What in the...!?!?" many times.

I read this book on my quest to finish all the Locus award winners. I am beginning to realize that the Locus award is for those books that don't make the Hugo or Nebula. This book is like listening to a someone list off all the computer terms invented over the past thirty years, and then try to make that a book. As someone in that field, I was very disappointed. While there were moments where the book could have been great, the author never took advantage of them. In the end, the author looks like he is trying to show how smart he is and how current his knowledge without ever actually getting to the story.

There are some pretty cool concepts (uploading one's brain, artificial beings, inter-galatic civilizations. But the author never really takes advantage. In a way, this is sort of a comedy for those who know the terms. I would avoid this book.

This is a very thought provoking book, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The author is clearly brilliant. That said, I did not listen for long continuous sessions, and I had to be in the right mood (like anything). I didn't understand all of the small details, and I wish I had time to read a hard copy so that I could google some of the science terminology. It's unlike any other book I've read, and I was honestly sad when i heard "the end".